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A Quick and Dirty Approach to Verify the Pioneer Anomaly

Alexander Unzicker·Daniel Schmidle
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Abstract

We present source code for the computer algebra system Mathematica that analyzes the motion of the Pioneer spacecraft using the public available ephemeris data from JPL's website. Within 15 minutes, the reader can verify that the Pioneer anomalous acceleration a_p (1) exists in the order of magnitude of c H_0, (2) is not due to mismodeling of gravitational attraction, solar pressure or spacecraft attitude maneuvers. The simple code of about 100 lines may easily be extended by the reader to include further tests. Due to the limitations of our approach, we do not know (1) whether the unknown raw data were correctly processed to generate the trajectory files (2) how the apparent mismatch of ephemerides before 1990 had occurred.

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Alexander Unzicker, Daniel Schmidle. 2007-03-01. A Quick and Dirty Approach to Verify the Pioneer Anomaly. https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0702151

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